@ibr_remote I think the days of Firefly development are over. It's just a little extra work to make a mask in Photoshop or Gimp. I also think it would go against how the Firefly node works as you would be plugging a color map into a data map plug-in.

What's really needed, and I think @bagginsbill has wished for this already, is user defined nodes. Not just compound nodes assembled from other nodes, but nodes that can call user code in some form or another. Then alpha channel extraction would be possible along with many other wonders.